Silicon Valley Gold Thieves Target Indian-Americans

As the price of gold surges, criminals take note of cultural traditions

A husband, wife and their 6-year-old son had just returned from the airport to their suburban home in Fremont. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, Sept. 11, as they unloaded luggage from their car. Seemingly out of nowhere, two men appeared, one pointing a handgun.

“He said, ‘You’ll get hurt if you do anything,’” the husband later said, asking that his family and their street not be identified for fear of being further victimized. “They took us into the bedroom and made us kneel down. I was very scared that we might be shot.”

But the invaders were not there to kill — they wanted gold. The men ripped chains off the wife’s neck, tore at the husband’s bracelet and then ransacked the home until they found the rest of the jewelry, worth as much as $25,000. The thieves have not been caught.

That the family had so much gold is not unusual. As immigrants from India, it is their tradition to own and wear gold. The precious metal indicates prosperity, is a means of savings, and some gold jewelry can signify a woman’s marital status. It is a common wedding gift in many Indian cultures.

Thieves, it appears, have learned of these traditions, leading to a rash of robberies throughout Silicon Valley’s Indian-American communities in recent months. Indian-Americans are one of the fastest-growing Bay Area populations, and in Santa Clara County alone their number nearly doubled, to 111,000, in the past decade, according to the United States census.

The exact number of gold thefts is difficult to determine because the crimes have happened in several jurisdictions and victims’ ethnicity is not always made public. But interviews with the police, government and civic leaders, and representatives of the region’s Indian-American community confirmed the trend and growing alarm.

“It increased significantly nine months ago,” said Anu Natarajian, a Fremont city councilwoman. “It’s not a random thing that’s happening. People are afraid. People are nervous about it.”

Sgt. Jeff Swadener of the Fremont Police Department said Indian-Americans were known for owning high-quality gold of 20 and 22 karats. With the price of gold surging since the recession began ($1,614 per ounce on Thursday), that makes them lucrative targets.

“You’ll get just as much out of a house as you would robbing a bank,” Sergeant Swadener said, adding that criminals also know that the criminal charges for burglarizing homes are lesser than those for robbing a bank.

Most of the thefts have happened while residents were not home, and had inadvertently advertised the fact through another tradition: they leave their shoes outside the home on stoops or in racks.

“No shoes, no one home,” Sergeant Swadener said.

But the incident in Fremont has elevated the crimes to a new level of concern. The home invasion was ignored by mainstream news media, but the news that a family, including a young boy, was forced to kneel as if awaiting execution has swept through the Indian-American community.

“We got concerned when we heard the family was held at gunpoint,” said Krati R, co-founder of Bay Area Desi, a year-old website for Indians. She said people worried that their traditions had made them “easy targets.”

Tanuja Bahah, executive director of the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, said, “In India, gold is seen as security.” For women who did not work outside their home, Bahah said, gold represents a nest egg of reliable value.

Indeed, gold has taken on such meaning for many since the recent recession began, not just those of Indian heritage. With gold prices so high, the nation has seen a proliferation in businesses that buy jewelry for its gold value, often with no questions asked, allowing thieves to easily and quickly profit from stolen goods.

Robberies of gold jewelry have been reported throughout the Bay Area in recent months, including at BART stations, and on Sept. 18 a gold dealer in Hayward was shot to death at his home.

A sense of urgency about being singled out is emerging among Indian-Americans. There is talk of leaving old shoes outside the front door, so it would appear that a home was occupied. In the Fremont area where the family was robbed, residents have asked for more police patrols and are forming a neighborhood crime watch group.

That effort is helping the traumatized family recover, though slowly. “Every time someone rings the doorbell, we feel a twitch of fear,” the husband said.

Scott James is a columnist for The Bay Citizen and The New York Times. He has been telling the stories of San Francisco and the Bay Area for nearly 15 years. He founded the underground ezine SoMa Literary Review and is the author of two bestselling novels set in San Francisco, “SoMa” and “The Sower,” which were published under his not-so-secret novelist pen name Kemble Scott. He has three Emmy awards for his work in television news.

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